Sabah, with all the English ways she had acquired as a little girl in the London she had loved, reached her teens in the new house in 1962, and studied in the international milieu of the Convent of Jesus and Mary, where Sara and Mehran were later sent at the ages of seven and eight. Two or three times a year Sabah would have parties in the garden, to which all her school friends, foreign or local, came dressed and made up like Hollywood actresses, and danced till their cars came to take them home at the Cinderella hour. These girls inhabited some private city within the city, their own particular teenage fairground.

But to Mehran’s mother the topography of sandy, stony Karachi, with its tall palm trees and stunted cacti, felt foreign. And all her children longed for rain as if they were born into intimacy with the rainy season, though they had grown up in this place where the rain was so rare: many of their games involved sprinklers, fountains, tubs and ponds to create illusions of the monsoon.

Of her three children, Mehran at least inherited something of her estrangement from the city’s climate. Once when he was three or four there was a three-day downpour and the watermelon patch filled up like a pool, and they bathed with their mother in its tea-coloured water. It must have been May. Sometimes, though, on summer days when the heat was overpowering or dust storms forced the city to shut down for the space of an afternoon, or clouds promised rain for three days at a time and never delivered a drop, their mother would admit she was missing her childhood home. Then Mehran and his sisters would plead with her to make plans for their next journey.

2

It was rare for their mother to leave Karachi without her children in tow. She took them to places they could share with her: unlike London, these were cities Mehran knew well, the only otherwhere he had, and more exciting to him than unknown England or Enid Blyton. There was Bombay, that big, messy city which, like theirs, was by the sea, but in other ways was very different; it grew upwards, and was hemmed in by its waters, whereas in Karachi houses were houses, smallish and detached and enclosed in walled gardens, and the sea that bordered the city was miles and miles away from where they lived. In Bombay they could see the sea from every window in the house.